Now, we come to arguably one of the strongest stories of this issue, art wise, and we will encounter several styles that I’ll try to identify based on some lively debates that occurred last year between Steven Brower, Glen Story and me.

Above, on page one of Killers of the Bund, we see what looks to me to be a splash panel drawn and inked largely by Kirby. It seems that he inked most of the foreground and left some of the lesser figures to someone else. The inset panel two shows another hand entirely and it is one that I don’t recognize.

Page two above continues to display an unfamiliar inking style, most of it looking like neither Kirby, Simon, Shores nor Avison. At this point, I’m going to introduce Jacob Landau into the mix, an artist who claims to have worked on Captain America approximately during the period this comic was produced. My old friend, author and Comics aficionado Steven Brower has just completed an article for Imprint Magazine, covering Landau’s career. Here’s a quote from the text.

“The singular evidence of Landau’s comic book work is on The Sniper, in Military Comics #10, published by Quality Comics with a cover date of June 1942. If indeed Captain America was his first comics work, and given the lag between production and publication, this would put him in the heady mix of myriad inkers who worked on the first ten issues, from late 1940 to late 1941.”

Here is a page from Quality Comics #10 above, featuring the Sniper. Perhaps we can momentarily entertain the notion that Landau may have worked on portions of this story. At any rate, keep the possibility in mind as we scan the remainder of the issue.

The fifth page is in my opinion one of the best samples of Golden Age Kirby that I’ve ever seen. It is a magnificent melee, wherein Cap and Bucky polish off a passle of Nazis. From first panel to last, the page is a wonderful conglomeration of beautifully fluid and lyrical figures.

The long central panel is a magnificent tableau, as Cap swings open both his arms and sweeps a horde of Nazis over like ten pins. the fourth and following panel is a classic pose of Cap’s torqued body from the rear as he swings a right cross.

The drawings are certainly Kirby at his best, but the inking is very possibly some early work from an extraordinary artist named Mort Meskin, whom we will discuss in the next post